(Enter Circe in a fearsome yet attractive costume; festooned with snakes and amorous paraphernalia that suggests the ferocity and abandonment of savage love. She is ornamented with paint, many large jewels and magic amulets.)

Circe If Love were evil, I would be the ultimate whore. Yet what have I received from men but an odorous swinishness? They turn to pigs when I pray to Zeus; they make love to me like Apollo. I am crazed with love sometimes but no lunatic; do you believe the slur that I turned them animal? No lover hungers for pollution. We all want heros. Men who cannot passably imitate the divine are still not pigs. We tolerate their less entertaining mysteries. So did l until I met Odysseus.
There are men who are fragile with their capacity for love; this is the special flesh a woman feasts upon as though she were offered a dish of honey. There are men like rocks who have no savor. Odysseus was neither of these strangers; he was a cunning survivor who had much of the duplicity for which the best of whores are well known.
Athena loved him though I cannot guess why. An animal forages through the trash of this world to wake up the next morning with a clear eye. The game for a pig is to eat everything, knowing that even the sand and mosses have a taste for devouring their own meat. Men have something of this low notion of perpetuating their hungers; our poets tell us it is the mark of the divine on this Earth that they will do and say only what they please.
Odysseus loved me; yet he did not turn utterly animal. We wandered through the isle of pigs together and looked at the faces of my old lovers like a couple haunted by ghosts. I introduced him to the biggest porkers, many of whom controlled little puddles of mud near my summer palace. It amused him to think these heros who were once strong men had become so uncivil from a year on my isle.
Over a large lunch of tripe and barbecue I offered this
sailor my wisdom. It is very different than what he ever heard from any of the monsters of the ocean or Penelope.
Much of it he already knew. He had awakened many a morning on a ship as the coast oozed over the horizon and died forever
in the morning light of menstrual blood. I had loved many men. They were dead or sunk in the trough of my memory. I had spent the night with many more men than I had cared for. Lovemaking to me had sometimes become no more important than a fig-laden cake to devour.
I brought some of that depersonalized rapture to our evenings. I made love to him as if he were another sailor washed ashore. He knew that. It gave him a sense of relief. As long as I was the perfect whore, nothing more was asked from him by me
than a simple perfection. He was expert at the very carnal transparency I was famous for.
I am a witch, a sorceress, and I have turned water to steel and back again, but he was as much the sexual wizard as I was. He was the consummate voyager.

For months we gamboled in the palace, high above the mud where the swine, my old lovers, lay and waxed into obese porkers on the trash we left in their pens from our ferocious amorous feasts. I knew he was within, devoured by some mute sorrow. I could not guess what his injury had been; he was mute on all subjects but the present. Given the double nature of man, I should have divined what ate at him like a demon.
We forget on this island how all men are not pigs. We comfort them as they plummet into their strange hungers; they despise us because they are not utterly in love with themselves.
Why not? Men more than women have a mistrust of love.
They think sex makes them weak as women. We women haunt them as all that is delicate in them, and they know all that is lovely but beyond them turns to their inner beauty. That is our gift. As Odysseus could testify, all gifts are not loved by the takers: not in Troy, even less in bed with a sorceress.
O how men hate our magic! The flesh next to them on a summer night is no wizardry. It is trust; it is an offering in darkness. What black pleasure it is have them within me! Half of the joy is the proximity to murder.
Odysseus saw the warriors of Greece impaled by Hector on the red coasts of Troy. Many a woman has been murdered by a drunken lover after sex; many of us dream of a rape that is vague delight.
The philosophy of whoredom is to cultivate indifference; I never did that. Well, here and there I passed a summer with something lower than swine, but not with Odysseus, never with him.
One morning he told me he was sailing for Ithaca. What could I hold him with? He knew every trick of the great brothel we fragment into wives, mistresses, or mysterious islands; he had whored with the whores of Earth and other places. He had known my every itch, my childish hunger.
I walked with him to his ship and hung on his arm. I was crying. I have more games, I said. Can hold you a while longer with my gold and aquamarine?
He kissed me. I have a wife, he said; a son. I understood;
no enchanter can enter the lists with nature. We lose; we
lose; we lose. No beauty smiles at eternity and its caress of death. No hunger does not eat or starve. We fevers we Heave around our mendicant lovers either kill them or cure those dumb as swine of their low insanity.
I watched him vanish beyond the grey line of water. I saw Aphrodite in the mist to the left of the emptiness left by his ship. I smiled at her; I grinned at this bringer of insanity. You, mother and queen of whores, I shouted at her as she skimmed across the blue cloth of sea, let him look elsewhere for our august intensity. Let him remember me like a haunting.
Then I lay down in the ooze and joined the swine in the darkening cool of the day.